Atonality (fünf Orchesterstücke)
by Bag Of Badgers
Summary: PruAus Leviathan-verse AU written for tumblr user austhreea. Vienna's air is growing heavier and thicker by the day with something bound to happen, and neither Roderich nor Gilbert know what to do. Warning for character death; title and chapter names are a reference to Schoenberg's 1909 "Five Pieces for Orchestra"
1. Movement 1: Vorgefühle

Gilbert Beilschmidt is quite possibly the most _discordant_ person Roderich has ever met.

"Still planning to spend the rest of your life in front of that piano?"

Loud and irritating and he has a grating voice and he keeps clean which shouldn't be a problem but it means that Roderich can't nitpick about please-pick-up-your-things-Gilbert which he would _love_ to because voices were subjective but neatness was _not_ and he really was being unfair to Gilbert right now but God _damn_ it if he wouldn't stop saying "G-sharp" every time he walked past when this was in the key of _D_ —

"F-flat."

— well, at least he had a concept of variety. Although to be completely honest Roderich wasn't one to talk either (how long _had_ he been playing this?).

"F-_sharp_, Gilbert. And no, I am not."

"Could've fooled me," and Gilbert whistles another semi-tune completely as he begins to stack the sheet music Roderich accidentally knocked on the floor about thirty minutes ago but he couldn't have stopped then since that would've meant interrupting a phrase and then he'd got caught up in it again and — he supposed perhaps he did spend rather a lot of time in front of the piano.

Which was not _bad_.

"Gotta move sometime, Roderich."

Roderich simply says "Hm," and continues with his playing.

He would agree, and Gilbert is often right — about some things — but really, it's the principle of the thing. Just like Gilbert appears to say the wrong notes on principle, even when he knows that Roderich is playing from pure muscle memory. It's just something that he has always done, and Roderich will move as he always has done when he wants to.

* * *

They've _settled_.

It's alarming to Gilbert how they've settled, how it just happened that one day he realized that they actually literally lived together and Ludwig lived with them and he didn't jump when Roderich somehow blew up _something_ while making tortes, and Erzsébet still came over a lot even though she and Roderich hadn't quite worked out and she and Gilbert still shoved each other around — it was probably half to see Ludwig, she wanted to make sure he learned something besides military tactics.

Which was silly, since Gilbert _knows_ that Roderich taught him French.

And then Gilbert had taught him about the uses of infantry in the Battle of Gravelotte and how even a scouting Stormwalker could take the ever-loving piss out of two French battalions these days, so Roderich had better tell you how to say "Put your hands up and drop your weapons!" really damn quick, kid.

And then Roderich had told Gilbert not to swear in front of Ludwig, and then Gilbert had said that that wasn't even really swearing if you want to hear _swearing_ let's get Erzsko in here and then Ludwig had said he heard worse when he went to work on the Clanker the local garrison had in for repairs and he wasn't a _kid_ anymore Roderich and Gilbert didn't get around to explaining Mars-le-Tour that day.

He did get to it eventually, though. See, he _does_ pay attention to Ludwig's education. And he knows that Erzsébet is teaching him math, more than the add-subtract-multiply-divide stuff, and Roderich makes him read that wet poetry all the time. So he's doing okay.


	2. Movement 2: Vergangenes

Gilbert is away more now.

Always, always, it's the Balkans. He runs off to the Balkans to get himself involved in whatever _petty_ skirmish is going to bring the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire crashing down around their heads, and Ludwig is all day off trying to work even more on the Clankers and figure out what makes them go — Roderich can't understand it, horrible loud things that they are, and Ludwig is such a quiet child —

— not a child. He's taller than Gilbert and he's filling out, at his age Roderich was already at a conservatory.

But still, he shouldn't be working with those. It's not…it's not _right_.

And Gilbert doesn't think so, he thinks Ludwig _should_ be working with them because sooner or later it won't be Giannitsa, it'll be Budapest or Strasbourg, and — and it could be but acknowledging it —

— he _won't_.

His fingers slip on the keys, and Roderich winces and curses softly under his breath.

The sonatas are a little harder to play, now. It is no fault in Roderich's fingers, he knows, they are strong as ever; there is just something in the air, some undefinable _thing _that gets in the way of the notes as they slide from his eyes to the tips of his fingers.

There are people trying to fix this, trying new things with tones and scales and pulling music apart and Roderich goes to speak with them sometimes, the Second Viennese School. Although Roderich has never been much for social interaction, they are agreeable enough. Leaving the house seems to pull a little more life into his fingers. The streets are still the same as before (why would he have thought they would have changed?) and he is _not worried_. He is _composed_.

* * *

Vienna is quiet.

Vienna is _quiet_.

Roderich has never known it to be quiet, but it is, under the heavy pall of _something_ about to happen.

He once went to London, when Ludwig was small, and the thick fog there hadn't been as bad as he'd heard it was before those…beast-things, but the muffling, stifling, oppressive _weight_ of it…that is the same.

The piano cannot seem to break it, no matter how much the Second Viennese School draws him forward, loud loud _loud_ but the silence will not break.

Only one sound ever does; but the steel footsteps of the Clankers don't so much break the silence as make it more obvious. They accentuate the deadening shroud, falling flat and lifeless as the old sonatas seem to now while the smothering inevitability of _whatever-it-is_ settles in.

Schoenberg goes a little way towards alleviating it, but not enough, not —

— The piano crashes.

"Hey, was that part of the song?"

"Quiet," Roderich grumbles.

"No, it's a serious question," replies Gilbert. "I can't tell with this."

"For your _information_," he snaps back icily, "it was not."

"You sure?"

"I should think I would know."

Gilbert chuckles, leaning forward. "Am I to assume that I've just heard Roderich Edelstein fuck up?"

Roderich sighs. "_Yes_, Gilbert."

He returns to the beginning of the measure. His delivery is mechanical, he knows, mechanical and lacking, but maybe that's part of it anyway. Gilbert, with his muddy boots on the table (Roderich tells him, time and time again, to remove them, and time and time again Gilbert does not) and his knowledge of music that Roderich knows is microscopically detailed in the area of fife and bugle and simply microscopic outside of that, most likely sees no difference. If he does, he makes no comment.

* * *

"It'll be big."

Gilbert knows Roderich is listening, although he shows no signs of it.

"The next one. I can tell, I know these things. It'll be big."

He smiles, but there is no humor in it; and thinks to say _it'll be great_, but there would be no truth in it.

The silence settles, despite Gilbert's best efforts and Roderich's new music. It worries Gilbert as well, it's the silence that bodes ill for young men. Soon, he knows, it will be the sort of silence where ideas like _dying for your mother country_ take root.

Gilbert has no intentions of dying for any country at all. He's seen it, and all it is is dying with added guilt, and he intends to live — for pay, if nothing else, but there's always something else, what would Ludwig do without him and only with Roderich, what would Roderich do without anyone to offer criticism on his piano playing?

_Ludwig's been doing well without you, anyway, with only Roderich, and soon you'd better stop living for other countries or you'll die for them_, says the voice that dogs him more with every battle.

The silence settles in bone-deep around Gilbert too.

* * *

What confuses Roderich more than anything else about Gilbert (a long list even at the best) is that he even survived the Balkans. Anyone as brash, as combative as Gilbert should have been, if not shot by a Turk, shot by an Albanian.

Yet, he returned. He always does. It is a fact of life: the sun rises and sets, Roderich can never make his Zemlinsky sound quite right, Gilbert returns from whichever skirmish he goes to help out in. He comes back and greets them both laughingly, asks Ludwig how're the tin cans and did you get taller, shit you got taller stop _doing_ that and Roderich whether he moved from the piano at all Jesus man you need to leave it sometimes the world won't end if you do, even removes his worn-out but shined boots instead of tracking mud inside.

And Roderich worries, he _worries_ constantly because there is not much else he can do (and if he could just do something besides sit in this old old house with its peeling wallpaper and dusty corners, could help could do anything could stop what looms over them all with a sonatina, with sheet music) and though Gilbert does laugh when Roderich worries over other things, never this. He doesn't laugh about things that worry them both.


	3. Movement 3: Farben

Since Gilbert was gone, Ludwig had grown — another inch, at least, maybe two; and he does it every time Gilbert turns his back. He's definitely almost as tall as their grandfather now, though still lanky. He'll fill out at some point, most likely, though there's a part of Gilbert that doesn't want him to and not only because then Ludwig would be taller _and_ bigger than him.

He can't quite understand the kid's enthusiasm for the Clankers — they're far too close to the navy for Gilbert's liking (not only could Gilbert not swim but the idea of being trapped inside an enclosed metal space full of easily combustible fluids and materials was not quite compatible with his desire to stay alive for a very long time), but when Ludwig was little he'd managed to disassemble and reassemble a typewriter in under a week, so perhaps it's natural.

Ludwig is enthusiastically showing him around the shop, waving at the two-legged Clanker (it's a patrol device, Gilbert, fits five and they're testing a new type of steering mechanism on it) in between tangents on how the Imperial German Army has huge six-legged ones that're more than a match for — for whoever they end up fighting.

(No way he can't tell who it'll be.)

(Admittedly, a six-legged Clanker the size of three city blocks could _definitely_ take on a fabricated beast and win without breaking a — springing a leak, but there's no way Ludwig doesn't know that they'll have to.)

Instead of saying that, Gilbert lets Ludwig keep talking (he doesn't hear it enough at all) and tells him he could really be a lecturer in this and Ludwig beams.

* * *

Roderich views the entire enterprise with a healthy dose of caution.

Not only because of industrial accidents, either.

He manages to corner Gilbert after dinner, not an easy task in this house with its old and unused halls.

"We — Gilbert, we need to talk about Ludwig." Roderich catches the confusion on Gilbert's face and adds "He's not done anything wrong" quickly.

"What, is he doing too many things right?"

Roderich sighs, resisting the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. "It's about the Clankers. I don't want him working with them anymore."

"What? Why not?" Gilbert is drawing himself up, straightening his shoulders — squaring for a fight. It's the air, most likely, Vienna is so _close_ these days, so close that Erzsébet speaks almost constantly of moving back to Győr (for all the good that will do, since there are Clankers patrolling in Hungary too, Roderich knows).

"You know why."

"No. No, I don't." Gilbert raises his eyebrows. "Why?"

Roderich takes a deep breath. "There'll be a war, Gilbert. Ludwig — he's too close to the army, like this."

"Yeah, but — look at it this way. If he's working on them all the time, he can't get sent to the front lines, can he? He'd be working, he'd be necessary there, so he'd be fine."

"He _wouldn't_," Roderich tries not to snap.

"Try telling him that, then."

"I will, and he'll listen —"

"— _really_ —"

"— and _you_ should too —"

"— I _do_ actually listen —"

"— if you _did_ then you wouldn't be fighting everywhere anyone will enlist you —"

"— I listen and you know I've come out fine every time and if Ludwig's not working on Clankers then look at him he's six feet tall and healthy they'd snap him up soon as look at him and I am not letting him anywhere near the front lines of whatever war we're having next and if he's a mechanic he'll be safe like _Hell_ am I taking him away from the Clankers!"

This is — probably the first time they've really honestly fought in a while, and if it wasn't about what it was _when_ it was then Roderich might even have let it drop but he can't now, he _can't_ so "No, he _won't_ be safe, Gilbert, because he won't be a mechanic he'll be a gunner in a Clanker and you'll not even be _in_ one of them you'll just be there with a gun, _neither_ of you are going to be fine but if you take Ludwig out of the Clankers he'll at least be safer —"

"_Look_," Gilbert snarls, "I can handle whatever's going to happen, I fought in the _Balkans_ for Christ's sake, but Ludwig? Ludwig's a _kid_. He's a kid and kids are the first drafted 'cause they're too fucking stupid to know better and I will be damned before I see Ludwig on the front line, and if putting him to work on Clankers will keep him away from there for even a month it's fucking worth it, all right?" He steps back a little, teeth still bared and hackles raised. "Whatever shit's coming is going to be big, it's gonna be awful, and I am _not letting Ludwig get sucked into it_."

Roderich grits his teeth, stares at the fading wallpaper. "And how do you know they won't simply take him into a Clanker division? Young or no, he's strong and he knows his way around them, and you know if he takes it into his head to enlist you won't be able to stop him —"

"_Shut up!_" Gilbert doesn't even look completely angry, there's a frightened, frightening edge in his eyes that Roderich will not chase, and he bites out "I'm _not letting him enlist_. That's final. He's not enlisting in shit and he's staying at the garrison and working on the Clankers there —" And then he cuts off and his eyes flick behind Roderich and he breathes out "_Shit_" at the same time that Roderich turns around and Ludwig _bolts_ down the hall.

Roderich is left standing in the hallway, fingers flexing, so gut-tearingly _useless_ that something pricks behind his eyes which he will not let out.


	4. Movement 4: Peripetie

"Ludwig."

No answer.

"Lutz."

No answer.

"Ludwig, you'll have to talk to me sometime."

Still none. Ludwig turns away from Gilbert almost imperceptibly.

"You know there's going to be a war. You're a smart kid, you're always hanging around the garrison."

There is still silence, but Gilbert knows that sometimes Ludwig can go days without talking for not much more reason than he has nothing he wants to say, and he can read those silences, and this one sounds like _yes_.

"And — and you know I want you to be safe, right?"

Ludwig nods, a small movement of the head but still there. He's fiddling with the bedcovers, twisting the hem between the fingers of one hand, and Gilbert knows that means he's working up to say something. He lets the silence persist, for all Ludwig can talk about Clankers he can't really talk about much else.

"I —" Ludwig begins hesitantly, still not looking at Gilbert. "I'm going to be fine, you know."

And Gilbert would love to think that too, but _how do you know they won't simply take him into a Clanker division_ and he just nods. "Yeah. So — so make sure you keep working on the mechanical stuff, okay? Keep on that."

Ludwig nods again, hand beginning to twist the bedcover around itself. "I — yes."

There's more Ludwig wants to say, Gilbert can _see_ it but it's not forthcoming. He sits heavily next to Ludwig on the bed.

Ludwig, tall and broad and well-built and _so young_, scoots a little closer to him.

* * *

"Roderich, you know he can be hard to deal with, especially with everything acting the way it is," Erzsébet murmurs.

"Yes, but —" Roderich sighs, pushes his empty coffee cup away from him. The café buzzes quietly around them, on-edge, people seeming a bit stretched. "He'll get himself killed, Erzsébet. Him and Ludwig both, if he's not careful."

"He will be careful. If Ludwig is involved, he'll be careful." Erzsébet reaches up to adjust the fake flowers tucked behind an ear in her light brown hair.

"He's not being careful now," Roderich mutters. "If he were, he'd keep Ludwig away from the military. I know Gilbert likes it, or has some fascination with it, but to drag Ludwig along too…he'll get hurt, Erzsébet. Both of them will."

Erzsébet's shoulders slump minutely. "And he won't come around?"

"No, he's convinced that they'll keep Ludwig in the mechanical corps and off the field."

Erzsébet snorts into her cup of sweet tea ruefully. "_Ludwig_, off the field? They'd be insane."

"That's what I keep telling him."

They both say "And he doesn't listen" at the same time. Erzsébet sets down her tea. "He wants what he thinks is best for Ludwig, and you know how hard it is to change his mind about Ludwig."

"I could at least try harder," Roderich says softly, eventually. Erzsébet reaches across the table to pat his hand.

* * *

Roderich steps up behind Gilbert, clearing his throat.

"Yeah?"

"I wanted to talk more about Ludwig."

Gilbert visibly tenses again, and Roderich braces for a denial which doesn't come.

"Oh?"

"If he — if he worked _less_ at the garrison, I would be — calmer."

Gilbert turns around, looks him in the face. It's a while before he speaks. "How much less?"

Roderich mulls it over, biting at the inside of his cheek. "Ah…one day a week?"

Sucking in a breath, Gilbert replies, "He won't like that. Two?"

Roderich pauses — inclines his head a fraction. "No more than two."

"All right." Gilbert smiles at him — rare enough, nowadays. "I — thanks."

That night, they sit companionably on the couch after Roderich practices Busoni, and Ludwig is on the floor with his back to the chair and a book about telegraphs in his hands, and for an hour or so there is no heavy, oppressive pall outside, threatening to swallow Vienna and Europe.


	5. Movement 5: Das obligate Rezitativ

And when the war comes, it is almost a relief.

Almost, and only at the very start, but when Ludwig hurries back through the door shouting — _shouting_ — that the Archduke Ferdinand had been poisoned in his sleep, so had Sophia, they're saying it was the Serbians, then the heavy _what-will-happen_ lifts, and there is the unchangeable certainty that they _will_ go to war, and while that does not mean a relief, it is one, in a way that Roderich does not like to think of.

What follows is not a relief.

* * *

Gilbert is the first.

He would be, after his service in the Balkans, and he spends the night before he leaves to march with the Imperial Army with his face buried in Roderich's neck, unmoving, fingers tensed in the blankets, and Roderich runs long fingers through his hair and says nothing — what can he say?

* * *

Ludwig is next, and he _enlists_, _enlists_ in a Clanker corps.

Christ, he enlists.

Gilbert sends telegram after telegram but the day after Ludwig signs on to the Imperial Army's Clanker division the draft goes out and it would have done no good.

The night before he leaves, he spends talking to Roderich, actually _talking_ like he hasn't in years outside of the workshop. He talks and talks until Roderich sends him to bed, something twinging and aching behind his eyes.

* * *

And then, Roderich is drafted.

He had expected it.

The training they receive is in all likelihood not enough, and Hauptmann Zwingli has one of the shortest fuses Roderich has ever seen, but maybe — _maybe_ — this will be over soon.

* * *

Roderich was wrong: it was not over soon, it was _never over_ and there were things far more discordant and loud than Gilbert had ever been.

Shells.

Sirens.

Klaxons.

Spandau fire.

Fabricated beasts screaming.

All far more discordant than he could have imagined, clashing and jangling at his nerves that already sing with the endless waits for orders, for telegrams from Ludwig or Gilbert, for anything at all.

When the breaks in the monotony that he has wished for come, he wishes for it back, anything but the _noise_ but there is nothing else, swelling around his ears until they ring with impact after impact.

They won't stop ringing for hours afterwards, and he sits on his muddy camp-bed (he'll clean it, he does every day, but the grime is everywhere) and can barely hear Infanterist Mateev's worn, cheap gramophone no matter how silent it is outside.

* * *

On June 17th, 1916, Roderich receives a telegram.

WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT OLT GILBERT M BEILSCHMIDT WAS KILLED IN ACTION DURING COMBAT OPERATIONS OUTSIDE LUTSK JUNE 8TH STOP BODY NOT RETRIEVABLE DUE TO EXISTING CONDITIONS STOP

— and why, _why_ does that make the thousand dissonant noises stop until all he can hear is the rustle of the cheap paper as it crumples in his hands and _hey, was that part of the song?_ and why won't the noise come back why did it have to be this that drove it away why can't he _move_ instead of standing stock still as the dreadful silence settles inside of his bones _why_

* * *

On December 14th, 1917, Roderich receives a letter.

_Dear Roderich_

_I'm sorry I haven't written._

_I'm in hospital right now, but I can't tell you where. My Stormwalker was hit and caught fire and my arm was burned very badly and they had to amputate it, and also my torso got burned, and they say there's something wrong with my lungs now and they're probably right because it hurts a lot when I try to talk. They say I'm recovering fast, but I can't go back to the front._

_Not that I want to, because the rest of the crew didn't get out and I'd miss them, and you can't operate a Stormwalker with one arm._

_I'd write more but it's hard to use my left hand. I hope you're doing well, please keep safe and I hope I see you soon._

_All my best,_

_Ludwig_

And again, everything is becoming quieter (besides the ringing, that doesn't go away anymore) and Roderich reads and rereads the scrawled lines in the hopes that they will reform into something that makes sense like the year-and-a-half-old telegram still doesn't. Gilbert, Gilbert who was untouchable and now Ludwig—

* * *

The noise stops, mercifully.

The ringing doesn't.

There is no silence anymore, with the ringing pressing through his ears into his brain.

Not when he comes back to the house, more worn-down now and the wallpaper does need replacing but he can't ever quite seem to get around to it. Not when he sees Ludwig for the first time in years and sees how his right arm just ends a few inches below the shoulder and there are still burn scars hidden beneath his collar. Not when Gilbert is not there, not there at all and dust collects in the corners of the house.

The noise is not — Gilbert had never been relaxing, not truly, but he had been comforting and the ringing just _pushes_ inwards and will — not — stop.

And there is nothing to distract from the ringing, because Ludwig does not speak anymore at all beyond tiny, muted noises in the small hours of the night when Roderich has to stay up with him. In a way, it is a mercy, because when Roderich sleeps he sees Mateev's body — what was left of it, and the wrecked gramophone — and he can't as much anymore when the ringing stays. It is not a mercy to see Ludwig curl up small and shake in his sleep.

Roderich sits down at the piano one day, exhausted — it had been a long night, Ludwig's right arm and this time Korporal Bozhich's body almost in rags from the gunfire — and sets his fingers on the keys.

He knows the position and he knows the piece by heart and when he presses down with his hands to begin the chord is

_all wrong_.

He tries again, and again there is something _wrong_ in his fingers or his ears or the piano itself something that doesn't work and his ears ring and his fingers shake on the keys and every chord falls flat and dissonant to his feet.

* * *

the battle of gravelotte and mars-le-tour were prussian victories in the franco-prussian war

giannitsa is an important city in macedonia (the country above greece)

the 2nd viennese school was a group of avant-garde composers who experimented with new scales and musical constructions like the chromatic scale and atonal music

in the leviathan universe, the archduke and his wife were poisoned instead of shot

hauptmann=captain, infanterist=private, olt is an abbreviation of oberstleutnant=1st lieutenant, korporal=corporal

mateev is bulgaria and bozhich is slovenia

lutsk was a battle and defeat for the central powers on the eastern front

lud's lungs are effed up because you are not supposed to open your mouth or take deep breaths while there is a fire close by, the heat will burn your throat and lungs, they are not as badly fricked as they could be but he's got a whole lot of other reasons for not talking too

schoenberg was a composer of the 2nd viennese school and "five pieces" was composed in 1909. it is a very tense and occasionally violent piece.


End file.
